Need LTO4 and LTO5 end of life

1) Lifespan of the tape media?

2) Or typical lifespan (total working hours - MTBF?) of the tape drive hardware?

3) Or support life (EOS,EOL) of the tape drive hardware?

.

This LTO wiki page may help:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape-Open

Probably best to ask your tape vendor, not NetBackup.....

See also:

https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/forums/lto-4-retirment-policy

Just before they start showing errors.

Very very difficult to trak without specialist software.

The manufacturers show a lifetime via the number of end to end passes.  AS LTO are multi-track, from empty to full is multiple end-to-end passes, so difficult to count.

They also show a max number of mounts - having discussed this point at length with Imation specialists, they agree that it's not a very good indication.

Why :

Lets say a tape should be good for 500 full writes (I've made that up, just an example).

If your tape drives are in top condition, no issues, and the environment is very clean and you always write to the drive above it's minimum streaming speed, the tape will probably last for the full 500 writes, or even longer.

If you shoe-shine the drives (write below the minimum streaming speed) you can damage the tape (and drive) within a couple of weeks if you are particularly unlucky.

If the drive develops a fault, it can damage theh tape.  If you put a damaged taepe in a good drive, it can damage the drive.  Is the environemnt dusty ? - again, that will cause issues ...

Do you move the tapes between locations, that can cause issues ...

So you see, a number of passes/ mounts is almost meaningless, unless you know that everything is running 100% perfetly, which is most cases it is not, which has a potential effect of drive/ tape life.

Software is available that can track errors at a low level, before they cause failures, and thus predict failure before it happens, so libraries have this feature built in.  Otherwise, I'd advise to replace the tapes every x number of years to be safe - at my old firm we used to generally replace after 3 years.  If certain tapes had little use, we left them for longer.

Actually we got a requirement to inlcude LTO6 tapes in our backup and restore product which uses Netbackup. So we thought that if LTO5 tapes are reaching EOL ,then we might be able to support. But now I have another question whether LTO6 tapes are supported for the below robot types:

SL 150,

MSL2024 Tape Autoloader,

MSL4048 Tape Library,

MSL9096 Tape Library

LTO1/2/3/4/5/6 tape media are all physically the same size - so if a tape library slot can take an LTO1 media, then it can take any other (LTO2/3/4/5/6) media too.

However, you'll have to go to the hardware vendor to determine whether they have options to replace/upgrade tape drives within the tape libraries.

I can add that I definitely know that those three HP models all support LTO6 drives... but you'll have to check the connectivity too - some libraries may not have a SCSI option, and may only have SAS, or may only have FC.

And you'll also have to check the NetBackup HCL to confirm whether your choice of tape drive model and library and connectivity and firmware version is supported by any given NetBackup version and any given OS version and any given HBA model/version.  And also check the NetBackup Device Mappings version of your NetBackup version.